Here's the first 20 ... pretty compelling stuff
1. U.S. life expectancy at birth was 39 years in 1800, 49 years in
1900, 68 years in 1950, and 79 years today. The average newborn today
can expect to live an entire generation longer than his
great-grandparents could.
2. A flu pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people and killed as
many as 100 million. In his book "The Great Influenza," John Barry
describes the illness as if "someone were hammering a wedge into your
skull just behind the eyes, and body aches so intense they felt like
bones breaking." Today, you can go to Safeway and get a flu shot. It
costs 15 bucks. You might feel a little poke.
3. In 1950, 23 people per 100,000 Americans died each year in traffic
accidents, according to the Census Bureau. That fell to 11 per 100,000
by 2009. If the traffic mortality rate had not declined, 37,800 more
Americans would have died last year than actually did. In the time it
will take you to read this article, one American is alive who would have
died in a car accident 60 years ago.
4. In 1949, Popular Mechanics magazine made the bold prediction that
someday a computer could weigh less than 1 ton. I wrote this sentence on
an iPad that weighs 0.73 pounds.
5. The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago,
the average American died at age 51. Enjoy your golden years -- your
ancestors didn't get any of them.
6. In his 1770s book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote: "It is
not uncommon in the highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne 20
children not to have 2 alive." Infant mortality in America has dropped
from 58 per 1,000 births in 1933 to less than six per 1,000 births in
2010, according to the World Health Organization. There are about 11,000
births in America each day, so this improvement means more than 200,000
infants now survive each year who wouldn't have 80 years ago. That's
like adding a city the size of Boise, Idaho, every year.
7. America averaged 20,919
murders per year in the 1990s, and 16,211 per year in the 2000s,
according to the FBI. If the murder rate had not fallen, 47,000 more
Americans would have been killed in the last decade than actually were.
That's more than the population of Biloxi, Miss.
8. Despite a surge in airline travel, there were half as many fatal
plane accidents in 2012 than there were in 1960, according to the
Aviation Safety Network.
9. No one has died from a new nuclear weapon attack since 1945. If
you went back to 1950 and asked the world's smartest political
scientists, they would have told you the odds of seeing that happen
would be close to 0%. You don't have to be very imaginative to think
that the most important news story of the past 70 years is
what didn't happen. Congratulations, world.
10. People worry that the U.S. economy will end up stagnant like Japan's. Next time you hear that, remember that unemployment
in Japan hasn't been above 5.6% in the past 25 years, its government
corruption ranking has consistently improved, incomes per capita
adjusted for purchasing power have grown at a decent rate, and life
expectancy has risen by nearly five years. I can think of worse
scenarios.
11. Two percent of American homes had electricity in 1900. J.P Morgan
(the man) was one of the first to install electricity in his home, and
it required a private power plant on his property. Even by 1950, close
to 30% of American homes didn't have electricity. It wasn't until the
1970s that virtually all homes were powered. Adjusted for wage growth,
electricity cost more than 10 times as much in 1900 as it does today,
according to professor Julian Simon.
12. According to the Federal Reserve, the number of lifetime years
spent in leisure -- retirement plus time off during your working years
-- rose from 11 years in 1870 to 35 years by 1990. Given the rise in
life expectancy, it's probably close to 40 years today. Which is
amazing: The average American spends nearly half his life in leisure. If
you had told this to the average American 100 years ago, that person
would have considered you wealthy beyond imagination.
13. We are having a national discussion about whether a
$7.25-per-hour minimum wage is too low. But even adjusted for inflation,
the minimum wage was less
than $4 per hour as recently as the late 1940s. The top 1% have
captured most of the wage growth over the past three decades, but nearly
everyone has grown richer -- much richer -- during the past seven
decades.
14. In 1952, 38,000 people contracted polio in America alone,
according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2012, there were fewer
than 300 reported cases of polio in the entire world.
15. From 1920 to 1949, an average of 433,000 people died each year
globally from "extreme weather events." That figure has plunged to
27,500 per year, according to Indur Goklany of the International Policy
Network, largely thanks to "increases in societies' collective adaptive
capacities."
16. Worldwide deaths from battle have plunged from 300 per 100,000
people during World War II, to the low teens during the 1970s, to less
than 10 in the 1980s, to fewer than one in the 21st century, according
to Harvard professor Steven Pinker. "War really is going out of style,"
he says.
17. Median household income adjusted for inflation was around $25,000
per year during the 1950s. It's nearly double that amount today. We
have false nostalgia about the prosperity of the 1950s because our
definition of what counts as "middle class" has been inflated -- see the
34% rise in the size of the median American home in just the past 25
years. If you dig into how the average "prosperous" American family
lived in the 1950s, I think you'll find a standard of living we'd call
"poverty" today.
18. Reported rape per 100,000 Americans dropped from 42.3 in 1991 to
27.5 in 2010, according to the FBI. Robbery has dropped from 272 per
100,000 in 1991 to 119 in 2010. There were nearly 4 million fewer
property crimes in 2010 than there were in 1991, which is amazing when
you consider the U.S. population grew by 60 million during that period.
19. According to the Census Bureau, only one in 10 American homes had
air conditioning in 1960. That rose to 49% in 1973, and 89% today --
the 11% that don't are mostly in cold climates. Simple improvements like
this have changed our lives in immeasurable ways.
20. Almost no homes had a refrigerator in 1900, according to
Frederick Lewis Allan's The Big Change, let alone a car. Today they sell
cars with refrigerators in them.
50 Reasons It's The Best Time In History - Business Insider
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